Recently, a client decided to consolidate all of his e-mail into one GMail account. I’ve done the same thing: I enjoy labels and searchability far more than even corporate Outlook.

As long as you’re switching over to GMail for all the benefits, why not convert your old e-mails as well? This particular client needed his old e-mail moved for other reasons, but it was so easy, I decided to go and do it for my old mail as well.

In most cases, all you need is Mark Lyon’s GMail Loader. It’s super simple. You plug in a working GMail SMTP server from this list (or your ISP’s, if it blocks outgoing SMTP traffic), point it at your existing e-mail file or files, give it a target GMail address, and tell it to go to work. It then merrily chugs away, sending one at a time to your GMail account, leaving the old from/to intact (only the date gets clobbered). Beautiful!

In this case, the e-mail was already in a giant Outlook Express file, which isn’t supported by GMail Loader. No problem: just pop it into DbxConv and you’re good to go.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Web Dev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.